An open-ended approach to evaluating students’ citizenship competences: The use of rubrics

Abstract

In this paper, we develop an open-ended approach to evaluating students’ citizenship competences. We aim to give students the opportunity to describe what citizenship means for them in personally relevant contexts. We developed three rubrics relevant to students’ citizenship in daily life. Students in grade 10 and 11( Mage = 16) evaluated their competences or completed an assignment which was assessed using rubrics. The results show that for both approaches, the majority of students were able to provide relevant input pertaining to their citizenship competences. However, students’ explanations were often brief, limiting the personal context they provided and the extent to which they demonstrated higher levels of proficiency. This study shows that employing rubrics for an open-ended approach to assessing citizenship competences shows promise in allowing students to share and elaborate upon their experiences and viewpoints, but more focus is needed on improving the quantity and quality of student input.

Critical-democratic citizenship in Dutch tertiary vocational education: Analyzing opportunities for growth

“…Background characteristics. Previous studies have shown that citizenship attitudes can differ according to students' gender, age, the field of their future profession, and social and ethnic background (e.g., Daas et al, 2023;Munniksma et al, 2017;Slijkhuis et al, 2021). Students were therefore first asked which year of study they were in.…”

“…The relevance of the latter two needs is also underlined in the emphasis in citizenship education literature on a democratic and participative classroom climate. An open and democratic climate in which discussion and dialogue take place seems to effectively promote various critical-democratic citizenship competences (Campbell, 2019;Daas et al, 2023;Geboers et al, 2013;Knowles et al, 2018), including critical thinking (Abrami et al, 2015). Letting students decide on topics and lesson strategies, for instance, was found to stimulate students' citizenship competencesboth in terms of knowledge, skills and attitudes (Coopmans et al, 2020;Torney-Purta et al, 2008).…”

“…Open classroom climate for discussion. To measure the openness of the classroom climate, a scale from the International Civic and Citizenship Education Study (ICCS) was used (Daas et al, 2023;Munniksma et al, 2017). The higher the score on this scale, the more students experience that they can express their opinion in class (even if others think differently), disagree with the teacher, and propose topics themselves.…”